Do You Really Know Your Programming Languages?
- by Kristopher Johnson
I am often amazed at how little some of my colleagues know or care about their craft. Something that constantly frustrates me is that people don't want to learn any more than they need to about the programming languages they use every day.
Many programmers seem content to learn some pidgin sub-dialect, and stick with that. If they see a keyword or construct that they aren't familiar with, they'll complain that the code is "tricky."
What would you think of a civil engineer who shied away from calculus because it had "all those tricky math symbols?"
I'm not suggesting that we all need to become "language lawyers." But if you make your living as a programmer, and claim to be a competent user of language X, then I think at a minimum you should know the following:
Do you know the keywords of the language and what they do?
What are the valid syntactic forms?
How are memory, files, and other operating system resources managed?
Where is the official language specification and library reference for the language?
The last one is the one that really gets me. Many programmers seem to have no idea that there is a "specification" or "standard" for any particular language. I still talk to people who think that Microsoft invented C++, and that if a program doesn't compile under VC6, it's not a valid C++ program.
Programmers these days have it easy when it comes to obtaining specs. Newer languages like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. all have their documentation available for free from the vendors' web sites. Older languages and platforms often have standards controlled by standards bodies that demand payment for specs, but even that shouldn't be a deterrent: the C++ standard is available from ISO for $30 (and why am I the only person I know who has a copy?).
Programming is hard enough even when you do know the language. If you don't, I don't see how you have a chance.
What do the rest of you think? Am I right, or should we all be content with the typical level of programming language expertise?
Update: Several great comments here. Thanks. A couple of people hit on something that I didn't think about: What really irks me is not the lack of knowledge, but the lack of curiosity and willingness to learn. It seems some people don't have any time to hone their craft, but they have plenty of time to write lots of bad code.
And I don't expect people to be able to recite a list of keywords or EBNF expressions, but I do expect that when they see some code, they should have some inkling of what it does. Few people have complete knowledge of every dark corner of their language or platform, but everyone should at least know enough that when they see something unfamiliar, they will know how to get whatever additional information they need to understand it.
